that torture produces makes the invisible regime visible; it “converts the vision of suffering into the wholly illusory but, to the torturers and the regime they represent, wholly convincing spectacle of power.”12 The writers of Nunca Más, the Argentinian truth report, in apologizing for the “encyclopedia of horror” that the section on torture becomes, assert that avoiding the horror was impossible: “After all, what else were these tortures but an immense display of the most degrading and indescribable acts of degradation, which the military government, lacking all legitimacy in power, used to secure power over a whole nation?”13
Interrogation often accompanies torture even when, as is often the case, the prisoner has no meaningful knowledge to communicate to the torturers. The purpose of torture and its concomitant interrogation is not the elicitation of confessions or information from the victims, but to “deconstruct the prisoner’s voice…. The prolonged interrogation … graphically objectifies the step-by-step backward movement along the path by which language comes into being and which here is being reversed or uncreated or deconstructed.”14 The intense pain the prisoners experience destroys their connection to their world and makes both questions and answers insignificant because links to friends, family, and country disappear in the all-encompassing world-destroying presence of pain. Torture is a primary means of “destroying … [any] sense of solidarity with an organization or community.”15 Pain annihilates everything but itself:
World, self, and voice are lost, or nearly lost, through the intense pain of torture and not through the confession as is wrongly suggested by its connotation of betrayal. The prisoner’s confession merely objectifies the fact of their being almost lost, makes their invisible absence, or nearly absence, visible to the torturers. To assent to words through the thick agony of the body can only be dimly heard, or to reach aimlessly for the name of a person or place that has barely enough cohesion to hold its shape as a word and none to bond it to its worldly referent, is a way of saying, yes, all is almost gone now, there is nothing left now, even this voice, the sounds I am making, no longer form my words but the words of another.16
The forced betrayal serves to degrade the victim, and the very degradation (making into “filth”) of the enemy serves the state: “Torturers humiliate the victim, exploit his human weakness through the mechanism of pain, until he does take on the role of filth, confessing his lowliness and betraying cause, comrades, family, and friends.”17
The victim’s ability to speak is first, through the device of interrogation, appropriated by the regime: “The victims are made to speak the words of the regime, to replace their own reality with that of the state, to double the voice of the state.”18 The victim’s voice is then destroyed as the pain intensifies and the victim reverts to a prelanguage state of being. Torture reduces the victim to a voiceless body as the torturer becomes a disembodied voice. “Although the torturer dominates the prisoner both in physical and verbal acts, ultimate domination requires that the prisoner’s ground become increasingly physical and the torturer’s increasingly verbal, that the prisoner become a colossal body with no voice, and the torturer a colossal voice … with no body.”19 Torture, perhaps more than any other wrong, is designed to denote superiority over the victim, a superiority that becomes an essential insignia of the corrupt regime: “They [the torturers] would say: ‘You’re dirt…. You don’t exist…. We are everything for you. We are justice. We are God.’”20
In addition to the inversion of a victim’s language, other ordinary meanings become appropriated into the structure of torture. In the same way that words become a “confession” and a “betrayal” that manifest only the destruction of the victim’s world and become appropriated by the enemy to objectify this destruction, commonplace objects associated with normal living frequently are used as instruments of torture and death—bathtubs, beds, chairs, refrigerators, brown bags, ovens, showers, radiators.21 The infamous wet bag used in torture reenacted during the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings was not an instrument devised for this diabolical purpose, but instead an ordinary police evidence bag. Even if a victim can struggle to retain the ability to form thoughts in language, commonplace meanings have changed. The ordinary has become the horrible. The story that a victim has constructed about his or her own life is systematically destroyed, and the oppressors’ story becomes the dominant and only narrative.22 The writers of Nunca Más echo this disintegration as they describe the function of the secret detention centers: “To be admitted to these centres meant to cease to exist. In order to achieve this end, attempts were made to break down the captives’ identity; their spatio-temporal points of reference were disrupted, and their minds and bodies tortured beyond imagination.”23
We can isolate these elements and perhaps better understand them if we reflect for a moment on Paulina’s situation. The purpose of Paulina’s torture and interrogation was to unmake her world. The play provides only later accounts of the torture itself, but it is clear that Paulina has lost the ability to articulate her pain. She doesn’t like to talk about what happened to her, and she has told her husband Gerardo only sketchy details about it. Meaning was inverted in that her favorite piece of music, Schubert’s Quartet in D Minor, became background music for her pain. An agent of healing, a doctor, became an agent of torture and pain.24 Her world became appropriated into the torturer’s arsenal of weapons: her medicine (she was a medical student) and her music. Not only is Paulina’s voice destroyed, the content of her world and eventually her self likewise disintegrate.
The “wild and fearless” Paulina who assisted in smuggling people out of the country has been destroyed or nearly destroyed. The student activist has become the woman who gave up her studies, who cries out “they’re coming for me” more than a decade after her kidnapping, and who huddles in a fetal-like position when she hears voices or sees strange cars outside her house.25 Through the technology of torture, the prior Paulina’s world, self, and voice are unmade and the new disempowered Paulina is transformed into the insignia of the regime. And this transformation does not cease with Paulina’s release or even with the downfall of her oppressors. Years later she remains disconnected to the world. She has been unable to reclaim the things that were appropriated into her torturer’s arsenal, and she cannot listen to her beloved Schubert. No rebalancing has occurred.
In addition to Scarry’s compelling delineation of the language transference intrinsic in pain and torture, political injuries have a symbolic and communicative dimension that can help to explain why torture victims such as Paulina cannot heal themselves after their release. In a theory that extends Scarry’s sense of pain and injury beyond the physical, Jeffrie Murphy argues that “One reason we so deeply resent moral injuries done to us is not simply that they hurt us in some tangible or sensible way; it is because such injuries are also messages—symbolic communications. They are ways a wrongdoer has of saying to us, T count but you do not,’ T can use you for my purposes’” (original italics).26 Political philosopher Jean Hampton puts forth an “expressive” theory of retribution that argues that “Those who commit such crimes essentially reason, T will hurt you in order to establish that your worth is less than mine,’”27 thus making a “false moral claim.”28 Hampton maintains that some kinds of wrongs are moral injuries that affect a person’s realization of his or her value. These wrongs “carry meanings that effect injuries to a person’s value in one of two ways: either they can damage … that person’s ‘realization of his value,’ or they can damage ‘the acknowledgement of his value.’”29 The person is diminished and treated as an object rather than as a person with, in the Kantian sense, intrinsic moral worth. Argentinian victims claim: “We were objects. And useless, troublesome objects at that.”30
The wrongs are committed in such a way as to denote the superiority of the wrongdoer over the victim, and our fury at the wrongdoer in part results from his posture of superiority over the victim, his treatment of the victim as worthless, less than human.31 He symbolizes “through his actions that he had the power as well as the authority to recognize their
